Events
March 14, 2025
“I think it’s pretty helpful, but it kind of does a lot more hurt than good”: How youth wrestle with generative AI’s possibilities and harms
Location: Lockwood 205
Time: 12 to 1:15 p.m. Lunch will be provided at 12 p.m. Session begins at 12:15 p.m.
Charles Logan, is a PhD candidate in the learning sciences program at Northwestern University.
Talk Abstract: As teachers, school administrators and policymakers debate how, if at all, to use generative artificial intelligence platforms like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini in education, there is wide agreement that young people should learn about AI. In this session, Logan will share findings from a six-week summer program for high school students that explored the ethics of AI in education, police surveillance and social media. His study focuses on an hour-long discussion that features students confronting and contemplating AI’s often obscured ecologies, from the grueling labor required to produce popular tools like ChatGPT to the environmental costs of training and maintaining generative AI. Drawing on a theoretical framework that positions youth as “philosophers of technology,” Logan examines what critical analyses of generative AI the youth constructed, and how conducting this sensemaking about the technology supported youth in describing hopeful and harmful relations between themselves, the technology, other people, and the planet. His findings suggest the importance of expanding the ethical terrain young people traverse when considering what place generative AI may–and may not–have in our collective present and future.
Equity in Technology and Education: A Journey Worthy of Exploration
Location: Lockwood 205
Time: 2-3 p.m.
Event Co-Sponsor: University at Buffalo Department of Engineering Education
Moving More Students From STEM Degree to STEM Workforce: Is Targeted Career Development the Key?
Talk Abstract: An abundance of STEM jobs are projected to go unfilled. Researchers have previously investigated demographics and attrition rates for the lack of STEM graduates available to fill vacancies, however, there is potential for additional research examining the impact of career development courses (CDCs). Very little research has been conducted regarding CDCs within undergraduate STEM initiatives. The few studies available link CDCs to retention within STEM majors, however, retention is not the same as entering the workforce. We should not assume that students are progressing toward their intended STEM careers simply because they have persisted in STEM. We may lose qualified STEM graduates because they do not know how to navigate the workforce.
McCartney's lab has developed a questionnaire to examine the impact of student experiences that likely impact career development. The questionnaire measures dependent variables, for example, career goal and strategy development, and student experiences (i.e., independent variables), including participation in research and mentoring experiences. McCartney will present initial results from this large data collection as well as pilot data from our first longitudinal analysis.
Moving Through Uncertainty: Ensemble, choreography resources for sensemaking and learning
Talk Abstract: This talk centers how embodied theories of learning, informed by the artistic practices of dancers, can reframe what is learned in STEAM spaces and how it can be learned (and analyzed). In particular, this talk looks at how choreographic-based, expansive views of embodied learning can reframe uncertainty as a common feeling in science learning that is often used to discount participation and instead can be generative for ensemble thinking and learning. Across two primary studies, Vogelstein demonstrates how incorporating ensemble-based, choreographic practices into STEM learning environments can expand learners' sensemaking resources (e.g., movement proposals and responses) and support learning by both youth and adult researchers alike. Choreographic inquiry practices offer new ways to support embodied STEM learning that center equitable forms of ensemble participation while broadening the domain-specific conceptual terrain in ways that are generative for the Learning Sciences.
Visions of Wallingford: Neighborhood Learning Through Collaborative Filmmaking
Talk Abstract: Addressing the planet’s most urgent socio-ecological challenges requires coordination across individuals, institutions, the built environment, and the natural world. This kind of coordination is complex and involves learning at different scales of practice. In this presentation I describe my dissertation work, which seeks to better understand learning at the scale of the neighborhood, through a collaborative filmmaking project. Residents of a predominantly white, densifying Seattle neighborhood led a series of local walking tours, filmed these tours, and assembled the footage into a documentary film. By theorizing civic learning as a semiotic process, I examine how discourses related to neighborhood and community life inform participants’ modes of expression; and how these modes of expression are laminated into modes of relation over the course of the study. Findings show that discourses of care, accessibility, and groundedness emerge and transform through participants’ ongoing place-storying and infrastructuring efforts. From this analysis, I suggest implications for planners, education researchers, and others interested in creating civic media and designing civic learning environments.
Designing the Future of Learning: Collective Embodied Play in Mixed Reality for Young Children
Talk Abstract: With the rapid development of technology, young children now have access to various technologies such as tablets, VR/AR, and AI. More importantly, there remain questions about how we can use such technology to support young children’s learning through interaction in rich sociocultural contexts. Building on Cultural Historically Activity Theory (CHAT) and Learning Embodied Activity Framework (LEAF), my work focuses on designing age-appropriate science learning activities within a Mixed Reality environment. In my presentation, she will first showcase her designs for collective embodied play that facilitate science modeling in MR. Next, I will address the challenges of assessing embodied learning in MR environments through traditional methods. I will share my mixed methods approaches to documenting young learners' collective embodied learning, offering a comprehensive view of their educational experiences.
Collaborative Map Building to Engage a Rural Community’s Locally-Held, Landscape-Based Climate Knowledge
Talk Abstract: Climate change threats are ever increasing, forcing communities to ask: what do they value and how are they going to protect it? Community-based climate education should play a central role in supporting equitable local decisions regarding local responses to climate challenges. However, there is little research about how to best support communities, especially rural communities that may be skeptical of climate change, to see how climate change is affecting their landscapes. Guided by the perspectives and practices of critical data science and story listening, I frame my research around data and story. Prior work has considered the role of climate data within environmental education and story within community scholarship, but there is still a need to explore expanded notions of data within community learning and the role of community-held stories in local decision-making. My work focuses on how local, personally held landscape and climate data might complement and extend local, institutionally held data and how map building might support data-rich storytelling and listening. In this talk I will share my community-based work building a map with six residents of a conservative-leaning, rural community and how collaborative map design supported participants to convene knowledge about local landscape and climate, ratify that knowledge through inclusion onto a public map, and ultimately inform community decision making. I found the collaborative map building process allowed local, often generationally held, climate and landscape knowledge to become community-held understanding, pointing to a pathway for engaging community members in understanding how local and beyond-local socio-cultural values and systems are physically embodied in their local landscapes.
dándoles sus flores // Giving Them Their Flowers: Youth Participatory Archives and WOC Digital Art Exhibitions as Intergenerational Sites of Learning
Talk Abstract: Chicanas and other women of color (WOC) have long centered embodied knowledge and storytelling as a critical part of intergenerational healing and learning. However, these experiences are not typically accounted for and are often invisibilized. Dr. Wendy Barrales, PhD explores what we might learn when we attune, document, and account for intergenerational WOC experiences across time and space. Grounded in arts-based methods and feminista embodied knowledge, this research showcases the creation of the Women of Color Archive (WOCArchive), a digital storytelling project preserving the stories of matriarchs of color. Through an emphasis on the feminist praxis of process over product, Barrales’s purpose is twofold: first, to describe how the digital art pieces and archive were co-created alongside youth and showcased at a public art exhibition and, second, to center and celebrate WOC as experts and knowledge producers. Through documenting, preserving, and amplifying their stories, Barrales's research attempts to begin giving women of color their flowers.
The International Society of the Learning Sciences Annual Meeting
The International Society of the Learning Sciences is an interdisciplinary society dedicated to the research of learning in all of its forms. Their annual conference will be hosted by the University at Buffalo in 2024 with the theme:
"Learning as a cornerstone of healing, resilience and community"
Date: June 10-14, 2024
Learning in Action: Applying Learning Sciences to Tackle Social Challenges
Join us as we explore the pivotal role of learning sciences in addressing societal issues. A distinguished panel of experts will discuss the intersection of research, design, and interdisciplinary collaboration in shaping the future of the field.
Date: Friday, May 3, 2024
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Location: 120 Clemens Hall, University at Buffalo, North Campus
Featured Panelists
Philip Bell is the Shauna C. Larson Chair in Learning Sciences, director of the Institute for Science + Math Education, and professor of education at the University of Washington Seattle. He was a founding member of the Board on Science Education of the National Academy of Sciences and served on the committee that authored the NASEM Framework for K-12 Science Education in 2012, which led to the development of the Next Generation Science Standards for K-12 science education. He edits the practitioner learning resource collection.
Susan R. Goldman is a distinguished professor emerita of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Psychology, and Education at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the International Society of the Learning Science, and of the Society for Text and Discourse. She is a founding co-director of UIC’s Learning Sciences Research Institute.
Brian K. Smith is the Honorable David S. Nelson Chair in Education, and associate dean for research at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College. He also holds an appointment in BC’s Department of Computer Science. He has directed research and program development in information sciences and STEAM education at the National Science Foundation, Drexel University, Penn State, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the MIT Media Lab.
Candace Thille is an associate professor of education at Stanford University and faculty director of workforce and adult learning at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. Previously, she was the Director of Learning Science at Amazon.com and the founding director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University.